


Reversion

by NebulousMistress



Category: Stargate Atlantis: Legacy Series - Various Authors
Genre: Free to a good home, Future Fic, Other, Weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 09:56:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7613623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NebulousMistress/pseuds/NebulousMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney McKay was rescued, everything's back to normal, all is well. Right?</p><p>Actually, no.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reversion

The reversion was a failure.

Oh it looked all right, only a full head of lush white hair to betray what had been done to him. But the reversion was as temporary as the human lives around him.

Rodney McKay would never be human again.

It hadn't taken long to seal his fate, a scant three months as Quicksilver, Queen Death's chief cleverman of the sciences physical. But it was long enough.

There were too many stray cells that resisted reversion, that had accepted the changes. Too many chromosomes that refused to be ripped apart again just to satisfy the will of a mere doctor. Too much of his body remained Wraith.

He would never return to Earth.

But that wasn't the worst.

Every injury, every year of life, every twinge, every bump and bruise killed off human cells while the less fragile Wraith cells divided in their place. Wraith stem cells divided, differentiated, repaired the damage due to age and injury and as the years passed their effects became visible.

Pale skin turned paler, a sickly green-white that lost its body hair, grew shiny with oil and spidered by veins.

Adult teeth ground down, slowly replaced one by one with new teeth, sharp and grey.

Claws grew thick, needed sharpening and grooming and lacquering to keep them in line. Talons, too.

Hair was allowed to grow long, kept in delicate styles studded with tiny pearls to declare his rank.

The humans didn't notice, or rather they did and were too polite or too vindictive to say anything to his face. He heard their thoughts as clear as day anyway, complaining about his smooth skin and youthful caste even as they all grew wrinkled, grey-haired, decrepit.

Old.

Rodney was 75 years old when he begged Guide to perform the surgery that would give him back a feeding hand. He was 75 and didn't look a day over 30.

Quicksilver was 112 when he first fed from the unwilling. It's said his humanity died that day as he glutted himself on the fading corpse of a Genii stormtrooper.

Or perhaps his humanity died much earlier than that, when John Sheppard began to fade.

Rodney wouldn't have it. Life without Jennifer, he'd lived it for decades. Life without Radek, without Carson, without Sam or Teyla or Ronon? He'd seen their corpses, heard the news, watched them die.

But he would not live without John.

He wouldn't have to.

And so he glutted himself on the willing, on eager cultists bolstered by the retrovirus. And then he took John Sheppard from Atlantis.

The Seed was planted and Rodney laid down next to John for the last time, stroking aged skin and grey hair, ignoring betrayed eyes and angry words. Soon it would be over.

Soon it was. And as John slept so did Rodney, laid out next to him as the tendrils wound around them both.

He awoke in a hibernation chamber, surrounded by a personality he knew so well. A personality that survived, as they sometimes did.

And so, Rodney McKay stopped using that name as Quicksilver's hive, the _John Sheppard_ , arose from the shipfields and flew for the first time under its own power.

**Author's Note:**

> This plot is free to a good home. Just... tell me you're using it because holy hell I wanna read that.


End file.
